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25 Years Later;Lessons From the Pentagon Papers

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TWENTY-FIVE years ago this month, The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, a documentary history tracing the ultimately doomed involvement of the United States in a grinding war in the jungles and rice paddies of Southeast Asia.

They demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance.

The Government sought and won a court order restraining further publication after three articles had appeared. Other newspapers then began publishing. They, too, were restrained, until finally, on June 30, 1971, the United States Supreme Court ruled, by a vote of 9 to 0, that publication could resume.

Pivotal Moment

Then as now, the fight over the top-secret papers, whose compilation had been ordered by Robert S. McNamara when he was Defense Secretary, stood as a pivotal moment in the ages-old struggle between the Government and the press. But few would have guessed how much it would change the news media, how much it would change the public view of the news media and the Government and how little it would change the way the Government conducts its business.

Opponents of the Vietnam war, including Daniel Ellsberg, the onetime hawk turned dove who played a key role in making the papers public, hoped that doing so might persuade President Richard M. Nixon to change his policy on Vietnam. It did not. Less than a year after publication, Haiphong Harbor was mined, and the war dragged on.

The Pentagon Papers prompted the first attempt ever made by the Federal Government to impose a prior restraint on the press in the name of national security. In his new book, "The Day the Presses Stopped" (University of California Press), David Rudenstine argues that some of the papers (though not the ones printed) could indeed have compromised national security.

Few if any of the main players in the drama share that view. But even if it is correct, that only makes the precedent stronger; the Constitution, in the Court's view, makes prior restraint impermissible even if there is some danger to national security.

Victory emboldened the news media, and the contents of the Pentagon Papers themselves guaranteed, at least for the generation of journalists directly involved, that every Government utterance would be subject to skeptical (and too often cynical) scrutiny. The Nixon Administration responded by creating the Plumbers unit (so called because they were to deal with leaks like that of the papers). That step in turn led to the Watergate scandal and ultimately to Nixon's resignation.

For both the news media and the public, revelations about the Watergate burglary, the ensuing cover-up and the associated horrors, as they came to be known, compounded the doubts they harbored about the Federal Government.

But as reporters, editors and commentators challenged top officials they had once treated deferentially, and as they probed their characters and personal lives as well as their public actions, many Americans came to resent the press. Journalists' standing in opinion polls sank along with the politicians'.

Governments, meantime, have continued to conceal and, on occasion, to prevaricate. The Iran-contra affair, almost certainly illegal, was conceived and carried out by the Reagan Administration in total secrecy, and no one involved blew the whistle -- any more than anyone had done so during the months and years as the nation stumbled ever deeper into the Vietnam quagmire.

While pretending otherwise, the Bush Administration allowed Iraq to build its strength by buying foreign arms. In the Persian Gulf war, the Pentagon sought to limit journalists' access, having decided that in Vietnam reporters knew too much, not that they had been too often lied to.

Many familiar with the situation in the Balkans as the United States and its allies seek to maintain a shaky peace wonder how far, in an election year, the White House will go in trying to make that peace seem more solid than it really is.

Though the Pentagon Papers dealt with a foreign war, they taught a lesson applicable to domestic politics as well: It is almost always better, once trouble breaks, to get out all the damaging evidence at once, rather than stonewalling and allowing it to trickle into the public domain, thus creating the impression of an ever-mounting crisis. It is a lesson mostly unlearned.

Why? Partly the natural impulse for self-protection, partly the deep-seated governmental belief that the public should not be allowed to watch the sloppy business of policy-making because it would not understand and partly the conviction that the policy makers know best and mean well.

In the Whitewater affair, one new Administration version of events has succeeded another. Having seen the consequences of the Watergate cover-up, David Gergen tried during his brief tenure as an adviser in the Clinton White House to avoid incremental revelations, but he has told friends since that he failed.

The Birth of Spin

A more-or-less permanent tension between reporters and officeholders has developed -- not an altogether unhealthy state of affairs, perhaps, so long as it does not degenerate into deep-seated animosity and distrust. For reporters, the official version of events is "spin," not fact. Government officials tend to believe that reporters judge and interpret before they bother to report.

Mr. Ellsberg thinks there is probably no avoiding the tension.

"That's the lesson of the Pentagon papers," he said in an interview last week. "No matter how smart people are in the White House and the Pentagon, no matter how well intentioned, they can get into crazy and illegal activities. And once they're in, and these schemes begin to fail, you cannot count on them to have the moral courage to admit a mistake, to cut their losses, to throw in the towel, to get out."

Stop the Presses

The following telegram was sent to The New York Times on June 14, 1971. Before it was received by The Times, an F.B.I. operator in Washington mistakenly transmitted the message to a fish company in Brooklyn.

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger President and Publisher The New York Times New York New York

I have been advised by the Secretary of Defense that the material published in The New York Times on June 13, 14, 1971 captioned "Key Texts From Pentagon's Vietnam Study" contains information relating to the national defense of the United States and bears a top secret classification.

As such, publication of this information is directly prohibited by the provisions of the Espionage law, Title 18, United States Code, Section 793.

Moreover further publication of information of this character will cause irreparable injury to the defense interests of the United States.

Accordingly, I respectfully request that you publish no further information of this character and advise me that you have made arrangements for the return of these documents to the Department of Defense.

John W. Mitchell Attorney General

Correction: June 30, 1996

An article last Sunday on the 25th anniversary of the Pentagon Papers court case misstated the Supreme Court's vote to let publication resume. It was 6 to 3, not 9 to 0.

A version of this article appears in print on June 23, 1996, on Page 4004005 of the National edition with the headline: 25 Years Later;Lessons From the Pentagon Papers. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe